Metal Gear Solid: Operation NightRiver
by Nixonhacker
Summary: Sequel to Operation RedFox. Solid Snake and Raiden sneak into a subterranean Metal Gear production center beneath a Chinese prison. Things get complicated when Raiden refuses to kill unarmed scientists in order to complete the mission.
1. Chapter 1

METAL GEAR SOLID

OPERATION NIGHTRIVER

2012 – Somewhere in Guangdong Province, China…

Sil Lum Incarceration Facility stood in the center of the urban sprawl that had become Guangdong's downtown area. It used to be a secondary boarding school, and the Western-style brick and ivy made it look like any 1930s American east coast alma mater. The only major difference the young Chinese woman and her companion could see was that instead of fresh-faced young male patricians, the windows were full of men in bright orange suits, some banging on the glass, others shouting loud enough to be heard all the way to the security checkpoint out front.

The crisp spring rain beat down in a steady rhythm, and she watched the water turn the world into a blur as she saw it through the windshield. They had sat with the engine off for nearly ten minutes at the checkpoint, waiting for the soldiers to look over their papers. In the meantime, the young soldier standing near the truck's window leered at her and loudly whispered lewd comments in Cantonese to his squad mate.

She ignored them.

The Caucasian man driving the truck waited patiently, a cigarette in his mouth and a sour expression on his face. He had greying hair and unsettling blue eyes, and wore a trench coat. In the back of the police van, he heard his two passengers – his partner and the prisoner – talking between the two of them, as they had been the entire journey from the airport.

Finally, one of the guards came alongside the driver's side and spoke with the man. As the guard approached, the man driving the truck thumped on the partition between himself and the passengers in back, and they instantly dummied up.

"Detective Jackson," the soldier said in heavily-accented English. "You clear. Please, pull in."

The detective thanked him in his own broken Mandarin, and then the partition rose and he shifted into gear. The young Chinese girl watched the soldiers looking at her as they walked alongside the truck. One of them made an unseemly gesture and the guard that had told the detective to move forward chastised him.

They pulled up to the roundabout at the front door and the detective and his young female passenger got out. The soldiers leveled their Type 56 rifles at the back door of the van and one of them reached out to open it.

Inside, the half-light of the rainstorm allowed the soldiers to see two men. One wore an orange prison jumpsuit with a black bag over his head and his arms manacled behind his back, chains connecting them to the manacles about his ankles. The other man also wore an American detective's trench coat, but he had long gray hair and round glasses and didn't look at all like the rough street type that American cops always made themselves out to be.

The detective in the back of the truck stood and jostled the prisoner to his feet.

"Uh… come on motherfucker! Get moving!" the detective said, pushing the prisoner down the foot ramp and into the arms of the other guards.

Detective Jackson and the Chinese girl followed the group as they marshaled the prisoner through the front doors and down a long series of hallways, Detective Jackson's partner close behind them. The prisoner stumbled several times as the guards jeered him, barely allowing him to keep his balance. The young soldier kept glancing back at the Chinese girl with questioning looks behind the back of his superior. She continued to look away, and Detective Jackson gave the young soldier an intimidating look that caused him to wither.

They arrived at the lockup area, and the detective with the glasses held back with the other American and the young woman. The guards entered the prisoner in lockup and returned presently. They came with a distinguished-looking Chinese man in a white lab-coat who spoke perfect English, though the rhythm of his words still sounded very Chinese.

"Detective David Jackson? I am Fa Lo, head psychologist here. I see you've brought Dr. Lei with you, but who is your other companion?" he asked, shaking the larger, smoking detective's hand.

"This is Lieutenant Al Merrick, the fellow who helped me crack the case," Jackson said. His voice was low and rasping, menacing even though he did not mean it to be. "I couldn't have caught him if I hadn't had Merrick's help. That man gave us both quite a chase."

Fa Lo nodded.

"We appreciate that you've agreed to extradite him," he said. "That has often been a very touchy subject between our countries."

Detective Jackson held up a dismissive hand.

"It was no trouble," he said. "I'd rather he came over here anyway – the juries in America would have just let him free. After what he's done, I'll enjoy watching your boys work him over."

Fa Lo chuckled as he lead them into one of the offices. It had clearly used to be a dormitory decades before, from the way it was laid out and the position of the bathroom.

"You are indeed the iconic American flatfoot, Detective Jackson," Fa Lo said as he sat down. Two of the soldiers stayed inside the room, guarding the door, their rifles slung. One was the young pervert, who still eyed the woman called Dr. Lei.

"I'd like to discuss the specifics of Li's crimes here and in America," Fa Lo went on. "How did you find him if he used the same random tactics as before?"

Detective Jackson took a long drag on his cigarette and then put it out in the ashtray on the table. He let the smoke flow out for a moment, and then began to speak.

"He stands out in the dark real well because of his white hair," he said, pulling a silenced Beretta out of his trench coat.

"What?" Fa Lo asked, still confused over the statement before he'd even recognized the Beretta.

Detective Jackson shot him in the neck, the tranquilizer dart striking in the jugular vein and the soporific instantly rendering him unconscious. In the same breath, Merrick and Dr. Lei turned. The young soldier saw a look of smug satisfaction on the girl's face as she put a tranquilizer dart in his chest. Merrick did the same thing to the other guard.

The man who had called himself Detective Jackson brought a finger to his ear.

_140.96_

_Raiden, _he said. _You clear?_

The voice that came over still sounded young and overconfident, but not without reason. The kid had proven his mettle a few times.

_Give me a couple of seconds… how are you guys?_

_Targets have been neutralized, we're coming to get you._

_Just give me a minute! I'll have myself out._

---

Snake ripped off the trench coat to reveal the new skull suit, pulling out the bandana and tying it around his forehead. He turned the Beretta over in his hand to inspect it, then turned to Otacon and Mei Ling, who were busy dragging the bodies of the two guards into the corner.

"You sure the new action on these works? I don't need to jack it every time I fire anymore?" Snake asked.

"Are you insulting my engineering skills?" Mei Ling demanded, hands on her hips.

Snake gave her a coy smile as Otacon handed him a Type 56 rifle.

"Wouldn't dream of it," Snake said, stowing the Beretta in its holster as he prepped the rifle. They were knockoffs of the AK-47 and functioned in exactly the same manner, though the balance felt very slightly different. Snake slung the rifle and turned to Otacon, who had removed the dart from Fa Lo's neck and arranged him so he was slumped forward.

Snake remembered thinking of Otacon as a shaky, insecure nerd back on Shadow Moses, but he'd become a dependable field operative with Philanthropy. Snake had worried about the variables inherent in forcing Otacon and Mei Ling into a combat zone, but it had been the only recourse, and he could only be relieved it had gone off without any tragedies.

"I think we'll be okay… it's been less than four minutes since he saw our faces, so the memory erasure serum should do its work," Otacon said. "Get Raiden out of lockup and we'll start the diversion."

The door opened and Otacon and Mei Ling froze as Snake brought the rifle to bear in an instant.

Raiden strode into the room as if he owned the place, his HF katana stowed on his back and ready to draw.

"Miss me?" he asked.

Otacon heaved a relieved sigh, Mei Ling slumped against the wall, and Snake frowned as he lowered the rifle.

"You're getting cocky," Snake said, handing the rifle to him.

Raiden held up a hand to decline the rifle as he spoke to Otacon.

"Hey, Hal – tell Snake to chill out. I've known him to get a bit too sure of himself more than once."

"Knock it off, you two! Now look, the command room is on the fifth floor. Once we activate the diversionary tactic, we need to get up there, take out the command staff, and close off the building. After that, we'll only have a few hours to execute the operation. Are you ready?" Otacon asked.

Snake racked the action on his rifle and Raiden drew the HF katana.

"Tell us when," Snake said.

Mei Ling removed a small device from her lab coat, and flipped up the cover on a button.

"Now," she said, and pushed it.

---

The soldiers standing within twenty feet of the truck were burned to the bone, and those within thirty-five feet were so buffeted by the shockwave that they did not rise as the flaming remains of the vehicle slammed back onto the ground. The explosion had lifted the truck ten feet off the ground and blown out most of the front windows of the building. Gasoline burned and smoke choked the front as the klaxons raged.

Snake and Raiden heard the boots of troops rushing past the office, sirens blaring outside as the on-site fire vehicle arrived to extinguish the flames. The four of them emptied into the hallway, Raiden in front and Snake behind him with the rifle, Mei Ling in the center with Otacon covering the rear, aiming his own Type 56 rifle behind them and shuffling carefully backwards, listening for cues from his teammates.

They took the stairs to avoid the possibility of being trapped in the elevator, but met with no enemies until they reached the GHQ office on the fifth floor. An officer opened the door and got a fist in the face as Raiden sidled up to it. Snake leaned the corner, crouching and firing high, shredding two more officers as Raiden charged inside. The last man got a slash where his neck met his shoulder as he tried to pull the pistol at his side.

He stumbled and fell to the ground, bleeding out quickly. Raiden wiped the blade before sheathing it and Otacon and Mei Ling entered the room. Snake marked the look of revulsion on Mei Ling's face at the carnage, but pretended to ignore it. Otacon must've noticed the same thing, hiding his face as he started manipulating the control panels.

"I've locked down the building and released the inmates from their cells," Otacon said. "Every level of the facility has hidden auto-cannons and teargas vents to deter rioting. Those should keep us safe while we run ops from here, but if you guys take too long, they'll almost certainly bomb the place into the ground."

Snake nodded as he scavenged a 9mm Type 92 pistol off one of the officers and a few magazines, loading them into the various pockets of his skull suit. Raiden prudently decided to do the same.

"Are you people going to fill me in now that there's no risk of me being tortured by my captors?" Raiden asked, clearing the action on the pistol before holstering it.

"Get to the elevator and we'll complete your briefing," Otacon said. "Get moving now, they're bound to know what's up soon if they don't already suspect something."

---

Snake and Raiden covered opposite ends of the hallway as they ran, Raiden's HF katana brandished and Snake's rifle at the ready as they checked corners and moved toward the large cargo elevator that had been punched into the building decades after its construction.

It was a cargo elevator large enough to carry truck-sized components from the top floor of the building, where the secret research lab was, to the very depths of the earth, where the PLA was housing its top-secret project… one which walked about on two legs and had the capability to fire a nuclear weapon to any point on the planet.

_We're in, but it's a key access,_ Snake said into the Codec.

_Your nanomachines will broadcast the clearance code in a moment, Snake,_ came Mei Ling's reassuring voice. She sounded perfectly fine despite her disgust a moment ago. Raiden heard it too and felt a small bit of dread. He wondered if her refusal to acknowledge the horror would cause her to crack mid-mission as he knew happened to some people. Snake didn't seem concerned, but then, he never did.

_Listen up, Raiden, _Otacon said. _That intel that the Colonel lost his freedom over lead us here. The People's Liberation Army has been stonewalling UN weapons inspectors since Ocelot sold Rex's data back in 2005. We've always suspected them of starting up some kind of Metal Gear program to rival the American-sponsored RAY program that Japan's SDF recently instituted. With North Korea already beating its chest over possessing Rex data, it was only a matter of time before Beijing decided to do something about it._

_All right, so why a prison right in the middle of downtown Guangdong?_ Raiden asked. _Are we looking for somebody with more info on where this Metal Gear program is based?_

_Actually, _Otacon said. _If you go about a kilometer below the surface, you'll find it yourself. This cargo elevator will take you both down into the heart of the PLA's secret Metal Gear R&D facility, right here in Canton. And speaking of which…_

The elevator shook for a moment, and then the doors closed and it moved downward. Snake nonchalantly shook a cigarette out of his pack and lit up. His calm had a way of infuriating Raiden at some times, and this was one of them.

_Hold on, _Raiden said. _You're saying you've just sent me into the belly of a massive Metal Gear facility with almost no preparation!_

_There you go worrying again, _Snake cut in.

_You can do it, Raiden, _Mei Ling said. _I've seen your Codec monitor from Big Shell… there were a few times I thought you were just as good as Snake._

_Those new skull suits are top of the line, _Otacon said. _Mei Ling has designed them to automatically staunch certain types of wounds for you. Abrasions and deep cuts will vanish on their own, though you'll still need to do some surgical procedures if you get shot – Snake._

_I'm sorry, did you say something? _Snake asked.

_What are we up against here? _Raiden asked.

_There's been a huge influx of resources to this facility in the last few months, which is what alerted Colonel Campbell to its existence in the first place, _Otacon said. _Judging from how much they've taken in, they could probably have produced several Metal Gears at various experimental stages. You'll have three principle objectives. The first of course to destroy the facility and any Metal Gear prototypes that reside within. Leave nothing behind that can possibly be reverse-engineered._

_Check, _Snake said.

_Locate the Rex data and any other operational R&D information, and eliminate it, _Otacon said._ And the final objective is to find the science personnel responsible for the design and production of Metal Gear… and… well, deal with them._

Raiden felt a weight in his heart at this last.

_Otacon… _he started.

_I'm a hypocrite, _Otacon said. _I know. They've likely been coerced… but there's no expedient way we can recover them from this facility without great risk to ourselves and the continued existence of Philanthropy. I won't sleep easily with it, but I don't see any recourse but to terminate any members of the science staff._

_Roger,_ Snake said.

_I'm not killing noncombatants! _Raiden said. _Mei Ling… are you going to help them do this!_

… _I, don't have a choice, Raiden, _she said. He could hear tears in her voice, somewhere behind it, not a part of it, but close. _ We've never had to kill the staff before… but this facility is too well-guarded and there's too much risk. I don't like it either, but…_

_You don't have to kill any of the scientists,_ Snake said.

Raiden felt relief.

_Snake… I knew you'd…_

I'll_ neutralize the science staff if it comes down to it, _Snake said.

"Damn you, Snake!" Raiden swore, cutting off his Codec and turning to face the man.

"Cool off, kid," Snake said. "We just killed a bunch of soldiers and I didn't see you flinching. Those scientists are knowingly colluding in the spread of the most horrible weapon we've ever made. They're certainly guiltier than that guy in the HQ room you just chopped open with a sword."

"Don't call me _kid_!" Raiden snarled. "Guilty or not, it isn't for us to decide! They're noncombatants! They can't fight back!"

"Neither can the countless people in North Korea and Japan who might get nuked by the Metal Gear they're creating down here," Snake pointed out. "Asia will be on fire if we don't do something. There's no argument about this. We terminate the science staff, and that's an order. Do you understand?"

Raiden turned away, sheathing his katana violently, his fists clenched. Snake shook his head.

_Goddamn kid, _Snake thought.

_Stupid old man, _Raiden thought.

The open walls of the elevator showed the change as they dipped below ground level. The first two levels were regular basement floors, but then they began to become reinforced concrete. Their Soliton radars fizzled and shorted out.

"Damn, that's what I figured might happen… too much harmonic resonance down here… looks like we're sneaking old-style," Snake muttered.

"What kind of resistance are we up against down here?" Raiden asked, deciding to keep his mind on the parts of the mission that he could stomach.

"We might run into a variant on the Arsenal Tengu troops. The PLA is never far behind the rest of the world where flashy toys are concerned," Snake said. "I imagine there'll be surveillance and automated defenses. The Colonel was able to give us a rough sketch of how the interior is laid out, and Otacon and Mei Ling went over it to analyze what areas they thought would be used for what."

"How big _is _this place?"

"Very big. They need to keep the air circulating at the lowest points or else the carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide settles there and pretty much kills everybody slowly," Snake said. "There's what looked like a very large tank hangar – definitely where they're storing Metal Gear. There's a large research laboratory floor where we're likely to find the staff, and a central core where a nuclear reactor powers the entire operation. There are a few cooling systems scattered throughout that don't make sense as far as what they're located near… we might find the IT server near one of them. And there's something else."

"What's that?" Raiden asked.

"There's a very large pipeline transporting liquid oxygen from a processing center up top to two places – the reactor, and also the hangar. We think that's what might be powering this new prototype," Snake said. "If we bring the reactor offline and remove the nuclear material so that it won't go critical, we can trigger an explosion in the LOX flow and bring the house down without causing another Tselinoyarsk."

Raiden smiled.

"An underground flow… NightRiver," he said.

"Otacon came up with it," Snake shrugged. "I'd just as well call this Operation Batshit, if you asked me to come up with the names."

The elevator suddenly stalled, and Snake and Raiden tensed, drawing their weapons. The lights sputtered.

_Otacon? _Snake and Raiden asked at the same time.

_I'm locked out! Hang on, I'm trying to get past the security, it should only take a second… I don't understand, the signal broadcasting from your nanomachines should've cleared you through their security system…_

The elevator disengaged from the cable and Snake and Raiden felt themselves plummet. Snake felt his heels start to float off the floor, his stomach jarring with the sickening, twisting, roller-coaster sensation of falling that had kept him out of the Air Force.

"The roof! Chop out the roof!" Snake shouted.

Raiden leaped up from the floor and in a single arcing cut, sliced a whole in the elevator's roof. Snake jumped off the floor and they both flew out the hole, grabbing onto the cable as the elevator raced downward. A moment later, they both heard a great crash that echoed up and washed over them.

They hung on the cable for a moment, both totally silent lest they give away their position to anybody. After a few seconds, Snake patched into Raiden's frequency.

_Do you see that access door over there?_

Raiden looked over and saw where the cargo elevator had clearly meant to stop. He looked back up to Snake and nodded.

_I can jump over and grab the edge, but I can't make the floor, you'll have to go first and try to clear the area if there are any enemies, _Snake said.

Raiden nodded. He could see the irritation Snake felt at admitting he couldn't do something. Back in '09 on Big Shell, he thought Snake might've been able to make the jump, and he thought Snake knew that also.

_Roger,_ Raiden said, and leaped.

He landed into a soundless roll, looking about.

He was in a tight, hexagonal corridor that ran several meters in either direction before turning the corners. He could not hear the sounds of anybody nearby, though there was a hex-shaped door right nearby with no window. It ostensibly slid open automatically, but Raiden was almost right up against it and his presence hadn't triggered it.

_Great, we're locked out… _he thought. He patched his frequency up to Snake again.

_We're clear, hurry!_

Snake grunted and, as he'd said, managed to make the ledge. He dragged himself up with no serious difficulty, and had the Type 56 out again.

"We need to figure out where we are," Snake said.

Otacon rang them.

_You're still several hundred meters above any of your objectives. Look, I'll broadcast the map to your Codecs… Mei Ling typed up a program for your Soliton radars that'll let you view it and your current position whenever you need to so you don't get lost… though you're on your own for locating enemies. You're in some kind of maintenance corridor, it looks like it might give you access to some of the other personnel transport elevators in the area. The upper levels are all routine maintenance areas, but if you can get lower, to the central levels, you can find the science personnel areas and the central reactor core._

Snake nodded.

_All right, I'm showing the map now. I think we'll be able to figure out a route that'll get us lower. What happened just now?_

Otacon sighed.

_I'm sorry Snake, but somebody must've figured out your nanomachines' broadcast bandwidth and locked you out. Their security core is somewhere at the very bottom of the base and we can't access anything here. I've told your nanos to stop broadcasting an IFF code, so at least the security system can't track your every step and breath now, but it also means all the work Mei Ling and I did to keep the automatic defenses from recognizing you as a threat went to nothing. Be careful._

Raiden nodded.

_You did your best, Hal._

_Operation NightRiver is underway,_ Snake said.

---


	2. Chapter 2

Otacon sat back in the command chair, and noticed a fleck of blood on the control monitor. He reached out to wipe it off, and it smudged. Next to him, Mei Ling silently monitored the perimeter. The soldiers had broken inside and were fighting to subdue the prisoners, but the fight was messy.

She watched the fatalities mount, watched the soldiers open fire on the prisoners. Some had nonlethal weaponry for prison break situations, but many still had the Type 56s.

"They… they won't hold for long, the prisoners I mean. Most of them are either dead or subdued," Mei Ling said.

"I know. Activate the teargas on the first floor when they get too far. That'll get rid of the first wave of them for at least a little while," Otacon said. "After that they'll probably start using special tactical troops against us."

She shook her head, and looked away from the monitors. Her own was also speckled with blood, but she couldn't bring herself to wipe it off.

"Hal… how do you handle this? All the killing? I know this was a facility for violent criminals, but how are we justified in this?" she asked, close to tears.

Otacon closed his eyes and leaned back, and she saw for the first time that the stress bled off of him in waves. He was not as young he used to be, either, and she saw that the violence had also taken its toll on him.

"Sometimes I think we're no worse than those we're fighting against," Otacon said. "Like now. But I also remember the pictures of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Chernobyl, Tselinoyarsk… and I know that if we can prevent that from happening again, we can justify it, even when we must do this."

"So many people will be dead when this is done…" Mei Ling said.

"I know… but the alternative is another world power with a Metal Gear program," Otacon said. "I created this monster… now I need to destroy it."

The computer blatted angrily – the soldiers were trying to breach the stairwell and get to the second floor. Mei Ling reached for the button that released the teargas, but couldn't.

Humorlessly, deadly, Otacon pressed it himself, and they both watched as the soldiers fell to the ground, choking as the gas overtook them.

---

The rooms lead to bundles of conduits and pipes that neither of them knew what to do with. Sabotage at this stage would only highlight their exact whereabouts, something which they did not need to add to their laundry list of worries. Each hallway lead to a ladder which lead farther downward. There were elevators that were designed for two or three people at time, but as Snake wisely said and as Raiden agreed, they'd had bad luck with elevators and would likely do better avoiding them for a while.

"Hang on, this one looks different," Raiden said as he looked down the next ladder. "I think the hallway below is widening out – could be an area where personnel regularly pass by."

Snake nodded.

"All right, be careful."

Raiden slid down the ladder and landed lightly on the ground, whirling around in time to see a bevy of twin-turret automated machineguns mounted on the ceiling as they snapped around to aim at him.

"Uh… Snake?"

They all went off at once as Raiden back-flipped into the corner, his sword clearing its sheath and deflecting the slugs as they flew toward him. The walls and floor around him became pitted with bullet holes. They clanged off his blade as it drew waving arcs in the air before him.

Snake slid down the ladder with the Type 56 ready. He turned and fired a steady stream, holding the rifle sideways and allowing the recoil to create a horizontal sweep. He took out half a dozen of the turrets in a single spray of automatic fire, and the remainder of them tried to divide their targets between the two adversaries.

This gave Raiden the time he needed to get into the blind spot of several of them, jumping up and slicing off one at the stem. Snake's rifle clicked empty and he let go of it, pulling the 92 pistol and shooting out the sensor on a gun just as it tried to come to bear on Raiden, who had already chopped off another at the source.

Four gunshots and a couple of sword-swipes later, the automated defenses lay in ruins on the ground, sparks and smoke drifting up from them. They stood in a wide corridor with a number of open doors on either side. The hallway ended at the ladder they'd climbed down from, that end of the hallway now shot to bits. Portions of the heavy concrete fell to the floor, breaking on impact.

"Well, if they didn't know we were here before…" Snake said.

Raiden peeked into one of the rooms.

"Oxygen masks, IR goggles, and hand-held oxyacetylene torches," Raiden reported. "Some other raw materials for construction and it looks like parts for basic repairs."

"Masks in case of oxygen blackouts, goggles for working in dark places," Snake said. "Grab those, and a couple of those torches, too."

They loaded up and found the other rooms to contain larger industrial tools that they couldn't use. Snake frowned at the pistol he had.

"Remind me to bring a sword along next time we raid a place that has no weaponry," Snake said.

---

The walls were made entirely of colorless, undecorated concrete. They gathered from what little Chinese they could read that this was Maintenance Corridor 5A West, and their map seemed to indicate that there was a cable-car of some kind a floor below them that would take them to the reactor area, near where the science staff resided.

"There'll likely be an even bigger security front coming up," Snake said.

"Sounds like fun," Raiden said. They'd arrived at a wide staircase that lead downward, about as wide as one that might lead down into a subway station. Raiden took the left side and Snake the right, their weapons before them, both ready at the twitch of a muscle to defend themselves.

They might have gotten to the bottom, but a mechanical skittering noise drifted up to them and they paused.

"I don't like the sound of that at all," Snake said.

A metal creature with a perfectly spherical body surrounded by eight sharp legs about as thick around as a thumb ticked across the roof of the stairwell. The eye in the center of the legs was about as large around as a basketball, and a compartment opened up on the top of the ball (which was actually facing the floor) that had a small camera on it.

"Oh, come _on!_" Raiden laughed.

Suddenly a machinegun telescope out next to the camera and opened fire, laying down a scathing arc of tracer rounds aimed at Raiden, who yelped as he deflected them with his HF blade. Snake gave the creature a double-tap to the body, but found the basketball center of the spider-bot to be superbly armored.

He adjusted his aim and shot it in the camera-eye. The creature twitched, losing its grip on the ceiling and crashing to the floor. It stumbled about, firing in the last place Snake had been standing.

"I can't damage it with this lame gun!" Snake shouted.

Raiden strode up to it and stabbed straight through the body. It jerked, sizzled, and then stopped moving. Raiden kicked it off the end of his blade.

"They're going to need to do better than this," Raiden said.

The walls and ceiling and floor of the passage were swarmed from around the corners with the spider-bots in the next three seconds, and Snake sighed.

"You were saying?"

---

The teargas on the first floor deterred the soldiers for a little while, as Otacon hoped it might, but the gas reserves on that floor had run out, and the broken windows didn't help to keep the gas intense enough to truly stop the advance of the troops.

Flinching with the bad feeling it gave him, Otacon activated the automated defenses. Machineguns popped down from the ceilings and started popping tranquilizer rounds into the crowd of soldiers as they shouted orders to one another, trying valiantly to charge the gun emplacements.

"Snake and Raiden are reaching the end of the upper-level maintenance area," Mei Ling said, keeping her attention firmly on the Codec monitor. "There are some automated defenses that are slowing them up… automatons."

She gasped as she was able to get the full count of them.

"Hal! There's no way they can fight that many! There must be nearly a hundred of them, and more on the way!"

"Hmm… hold on, I think we might be able to access some of those systems from here…" Otacon said, his fingers flying over the keys. "Remember that theoretical virus you and I were talking about, the one we could redirect through a nanomachine IFF broadcast?"

"Yeah, funny idea, huh?"

"Make it happen."

---

Snake's pistol clicked empty on the last magazine as he shot another spider-bot in the camera and ducked underneath the hail of gunfire that targeted where he'd been standing. Throwing away the pistol in rage, he pulled his combat knife, shoving it deep into the camera of the next drone that came his way. Behind him, he heard Raiden leaping around, bisecting the drones on the left and on the right, deflecting bullets in every direction madly.

_He's going to knock one my way and that'll be it, _Snake thought grimly as he grabbed a blinded spider-bot and pointed its rattling machinegun into the midst of a crowd of others, shredding them into scrap.

When the gun clicked empty on the creature, Snake plunged the knife deep into the neck-hole and tore out a few of its servos, then drop-kicked the defeated thing down the stairs. The shell crashed at the bottom, the legs twitching the same way an earwig's does when you crush it. Snake and Raiden stood amid a sea of their opponents' metallic corpses.

"Easy!" Raiden said, and then sat down on the stairs, breathing quickly and deeply, chuckling with his success. He was about to sheathe the HF blade, when another great sound of metal skittering on concrete reached them, and another squad of spider-bots littered the walls and ceiling and floor. Both heroes sighed, sure they'd met their end, when the machineguns came out, the robots all faced one another, and blew each other to shreds.

Smoke and sparks and small explosions drifted up the stairs, choking the two men for a moment, and they answered the call on the Codec.

_Thought you'd appreciate the virus Mei Ling cooked up just now, _Otacon said.

_What? That was you guys?_ Raiden asked.

_All Mei Ling, _Otacon said. _She used your nanos to infect the automated defense system. It won't work again, though… so from here on out you guys need to handle it on your own. Somebody must've figured out our hoax. Now nothing will read anything that comes from your nanos. You'll need to improvise the doors… those torches you found might work, or if you can find keycards like normal people. Just be careful._

They descended the stairs, walking over the destroyed automatons, to find themselves on one end of an enormous hexagonal tube that lead downward before sloping back to head in the direction behind them. A large cable car stood open, with some kind of security booth right next to it. Inside, Snake and Raiden found the controls for the cable car.

"We can't hit the switch here and be on it at the same time," Snake said.

_I've got it covered, Snake, _Mei Ling rang them.

Raiden had already gotten into the cable car, when Snake froze.

_Hold on… something…_

The cable car doors slammed shut and locked, and Raiden whirled around as a cyborg ninja materialized right outside them. Snake pulled his combat knife, falling into a stance.

"Snake!" Raiden called, but the cable car was already moving. The last thing Raiden saw before he dipped below the floor was the ninja gesturing toward the security booth with one hand, a torrent of lightning destroying it.

The cyborg ninja was not the same design as Gray Fox's suit. It was completely black with a red Chinese symbol painted across its face and various other things printed across it in red all along the body, all in kanji. Snake and his enemy circled slowly. The ninja did not seem to be interested in talking, but attacked almost immediately, a katana appearing out of nowhere and taking a full swing at Snake's neck.

Snake ducked beneath the swipe and made a cut of his own at the midsection of his enemy, but the knife skipped off.

_Guess it's back to basics… _Snake thought, hanging up the knife and jumping over a cut directed to take him apart at the waist. He kicked the ninja in the face and was satisfied to see it back up and falter, then discouraged to find that it didn't pause or shake its head to clear it as even Gray Fox had done, but instead leaped back into combat, forsaking its sword for hand-to-hand.

Snake blocked several strikes and dug his elbow into his enemy's gut, then head-butted it and delivered a knife-hand chop to its neck. Again it only fell back as much as the strikes could push it and then wasted no time in returning. Snake took a strike to the face and went down, but twisted his legs and swept out those of his enemy, then kicked it in the side as hard as he could on the pressure point right under the arm.

The hit might have at least momentarily pained any human opponent, but the ninja would not be deterred. Snake rolled away and got to his feet in just enough time to block a ruthless roundhouse to the face. Snake punched the thing in the crotch, braced its leg, and bodily hurled the thing into the concrete wall with such force that it left a crack.

The ninja flopped to the ground and looked ready to rise, but Snake didn't give it the chance. He dropped his heel in an axe kick to the back that slammed it face-first into the ground and then took it by the head and started beating its face repeatedly into the ground. It tried to shake him off, but Snake broke its neck.

The thing twitched and tried to flail at Snake, who continued slamming its head into the ground harder and harder until the fiberglass plating around the face had cracked. It finally managed to gain leverage and kicked him aside.

"What the _fuck!_" Snake snarled, genuinely pissed off now as the thing rose, its head hanging at an impossible angle as it strode toward him.

It leveled a kick at Snake's chest that bowled him over and then leaped above him, aiming to come down on him with both its knees to shatter his sternum and crotch. Snake rolled away and swiped out with the knife, severing whatever passed for its Achilles tendon. That same weird machine-blood that the RAYs had and that never really made any sense or got explained sprayed out and the machine fell to its opposite knee as it tried to turn to face him.

Snake plunged the knife in between the thing's ceramic plating right where its heart ought to have been, then kicked the knife in deeper, the machine-blood spraying all over him. Snake began booting it where it would've had genitalia, had it been a human being.

"Made…" _kick _"…in…" _kick_ "…China!" _kick _Snake taunted.

The robotic ninja surged to its feet and grabbed at Snake's throat, but Snake wrapped his arms around its left arm in a strange configuration and pivoted on his waist, and the ninja's left elbow cracked like a breadstick. He then held the thing's wrist, twisted it, locked his ankle behind its sliced ankle, and threw his body into his opponent's at the same time he pulled forcefully on the wrist.

The arm dislocated at the shoulder, and Snake punched the robot in the stomach, roaring as he did so. The ninja flopped to the ground and scrambled to rise again, not losing a second recovering. It turned and grabbed Snake by the throat, lifting him off the ground. The ninja was beginning to make a high screeching noise from somewhere, as if some part of it was raging at how much it had been harmed.

Snake pulled the oxyacetylene torch, closed his eyes to keep from damaging them, and opened up the flame on the thing's remaining functional elbow. He felt its grip tighten, felt his eyes want to bug out of his head, felt his feet dangle above the ground, kicking…

_This is humiliating…_

… and then the grip relaxed as he destroyed its musculature with the torch. The arm came off at the elbow and Snake grabbed it, stumbling back and dropping his torch. The ninja leaped at Snake in a flying kick, but Snake had enough oxygen left in his head to think to duck.

The ninja's kick crashed it thigh-deep into the wall and left it unable to free itself due to a lack of arms. Snake took the severed cybernetic limb in his hand and started beating the ninja with its own arm. When the metal bones inside the arm broke, Snake discarded it, cracked his knuckles and neck to loosen himself up a bit, and then broke the thing's leg that was still embedded in the wall. He then proceeded to break its back, several of its ribs, and both its scapula before sitting down on the ground to take a breather and light up a cigarette.

He'd gotten about halfway through it when the ninja shook itself free and hopped toward him with its one good leg, the only few bones in its body not broken.

"What're you gonna do, bleed on me?" Snake asked, stooping down to pick up the HF katana it had dropped and cleaving the robot in half at the waist in one fluid strike. Snake was covered in the explosive machine-blood geyser that resulted, but it did not stop him from dismembering the ninja with its own weapon, limb by limb.

Snake pulled his Beretta and pistol-whipped each individual piece until they stopped moving and the high-pitched screeching subsided.

Snake sat down nearby, watching the individual parts in case they started trying to put one another together again as he lit another cigarette and tried to raise Raiden. He found that he couldn't reach him. He worriedly sighed and raised Otacon instead.

_Otacon, have you gotten in touch with Raiden?_

_No, but his nanos report he's still alive… Snake, what just happened?_

_If you get in touch with him before I do, tell him to watch out for any cybernetic ninjas. They take a long time to kill._


	3. Chapter 3

A walkway lead through the gloom to a metal door with some kind of security barrier that looked like it was biometrical.

_Well, I hope they don't mind if I just cut the door open…_

Raiden exited the cable car, running lightly toward the door. A camera sat perched above the door, and Raiden stopped short of about where he estimated its sight range to be, based on the angle.

_I could discharge my pistol, _Raiden thought, _but the report might alert somebody to my presence…otherwise it's a very precise shot to the lens glass with the Beretta… and I've never been that good._

Without prelude, the camera fizzled and shorted, and the security station at the door announced something in a positive-sounding Chinese voice before the door slid open to reveal another network of hallways.

Raiden answered the ring of his Codec.

_Otacon__ Did you guys just bypass security for me?_ Raiden asked.

_No! Quiet, don't you know that this isn't a secure channel? Get inside now, just hurry up and get inside! It won't hold forever!_

_Who…?_

_Hurry!_

Raiden rushed the door and rolled inside. Behind him, it rattled and then slid back into place, locking securely behind him. Raiden found himself in the interior of a reception area that split off in three directions. A large concrete desk with a bank of flat-panel monitors stood in the center of the room, and the wide hallways that lead behind the desk and to the left and right had writing above them, but no characters that Raiden recognized.

Raiden made a visual sweep of the area for anything resembling surveillance cameras or auto-cannons, and finding nothing, took a few cautious steps into the well-lit area. The floors were of white tile, the walls were marble. The place looked the same as an expensive corporate tower's reception area.

There was nobody around. Raiden flicked the switch on his HF blade that activated the stun current and held the blade in a high guard as he crept up to the corner on the left and leaned it…

And stopped as he heard a buzzing sound, just a tiny bit lower in his ears than the fluorescent lighting. He took a long step backward, reached into one of his skull suit's pouches, and brought out the pack of Lucky Stripe cigarettes with the lighter rubber-banded to it.

_Okay, Snake, let's see if these are really worth lugging around on every mission,_ he thought, and lit up. He took a drag without inhaling, and puffed the smoke into the doorway. Bright red lasers misted into life before him. After a thorough smoking, he saw that the entire doorway was impassible, the lasers so numerous and so close together that a leap or a crawl wouldn't get him past them.

_Left is out,_ Raiden frowned, and, with the cig still dangling from his mouth, he investigated the right hallway, smoking it first and finding it clean of any lasers. The hallway extended to a number of rooms that were locked and appeared to contain bays of lockers and biohazard suits.

_Hope whatever is up ahead is something my smart-skin can handle…_

The rooms were numbered and had the same word after the number, though Raiden didn't know what the word meant. He came to a final door at the very end of the hallway which had two words on it, one which said "WORKER" and another which he didn't know. It was clearly nanomachine-activated, and since his code had been silenced by Otacon, it would not open for him.

Through the transparent window at face level, he could see what appeared to be a long row of lunchroom tables, vending machines, and other things. His Codec rang again.

_Who is this? _Raiden demanded.

_Please… if you promise to get me out of here, I'll help you, I swear! _It was a meek-sounding woman's voice, heavily-accented but with a perfect grasp of English.

_Who am I talking to?_

_My name is Sui Lin… I'm a scientist who works on the Scorpion, _she said. _I'll trade my freedom for information on how to destroy this facility… that's what you want, isn't it?_

_Yes… that's what I want, _Raiden said. _Where are you?_

_You're standing outside the room I'm in right now. But I can't open the lock… they've disengaged the broadcast signal on the __nanomachines__ of all the science staff so that none of the systems recognize them any longer… they're keeping us herded into small areas so we have no opportunity to escape._

_I've got an oxyacetylene torch,_ Raiden said. _Stand away from the door and I'll torch through it. It won't take too long._

_Thank you… thank you! I'm clear. Go ahead._

Raiden broke out the torch and tapped at the door until he thought he'd found the locking mechanism, then covered his eyes and unleashed the searing flame. Scoring out the lock was the work of a few minutes, and he slid the door aside and strode into the room. The dark-haired head of a small, mousy woman in a lab coat peeked up from behind an overturned table in the corner.

Raiden hung up the torch and raised his hands.

"I'm not here to hurt you… you can come out."

She rose slowly and cautiously, taking a few steps toward him. When she got close enough to make out his face, her fear of him left her and she hugged him tightly.

"Easy… I'm going to try to get you and the rest of the science staff out of here," Raiden said, aware even as he said it that it would be nearly impossible. His own extraction was in question, what with the elevator destroyed.

She finally let him go, though one of her hands lingered on his arm, running across the texture of his suit.

"This… this is amazing! This rubberized texture…"

She caught herself, and looked up at him fearfully again before taking a large step back.

"You… are you really Solid Snake?" she asked doubtfully.

Raiden burst into laughter, leaning against one of the tables for support until the fit subsided.

"No – no, I am certainly not Solid Snake, though I've tried to be a few times. My codename is Raiden, and that's what you can call me."

"But… he's here," she said.

"We got separated," Raiden said. "Look, I need to know if there's another exit point from this base besides the elevator that leads up to the Sil Lum Incarceration Facility."

Sui Lin nodded, sitting down. Raiden could see that the stress of capture had taken its toll on her.

"Yes, yes… there's another elevator, one on the opposite end of the lower hangar where Metal Gear is being stored. It will give us access to the surface," she said.

Raiden nodded, and sat next to her.

"Look, I need your help. I need to destroy all of Metal Gear's test data, any of its parts and… well I need to secure you scientists. After that, Snake and I are going to take the reactor offline and destroy this place by igniting the liquid oxygen flow," Raiden said.

Sui Lin nodded.

"I want this place to come crashing down. I was coerced into becoming a scientist here. They have my family… the families of all the other scientists, too, that were not willing to take part in Metal Gear's development. When the fiasco at the prison on the surface began a while ago, they started going into a security lockdown. This entire facility will try to kill us now… there will only be a few areas where we will be safe. We must retrieve the rest of the science staff – they'll know how to make sure nothing of our work survives down here."

Raiden rose and unsheathed his HF blade, swinging it artfully as he paced.

"Are there armed personnel down here?" Raiden asked.

"Yes, some. They'll be guarding the rest of the science staff. I got away from them earlier, but only got this far before my nanomachine IFF was locked out. The others are being held near the reactor core. The troops guarding them are heavily-armed, and supported by the automatons," said Sui Lin.

"Automatons – that black ninja I saw that threw lightning around. That wasn't human?"

"No… all machine, designed around the same actuation principles as Metal Gear. Years ahead of anything Japan or the United States have introduced in robotics…" she stopped, and Raiden wondered if it wasn't because she had a bit of pride in her voice as she spoke.

"Ahead of its time or not, Snake probably tore it limb from limb," Raiden said. "First thing's first… which is closer to us, the reactor core or the IT server?"

"The core is… I-I think, I'd have to check…"

Raiden's Codec buzzed.

_Mei Ling?_

_Raiden__, thank goodness you're okay! Where are you?_

_I'm below where Snake is… was… I think. I'm in the science wing right now, but most of the scientists have been moved to the core… I found one, a female scientist named Sui Lin. Look, uh, keep this a secret from Snake, okay? She says there might be a way to get everybody out of here – an elevator on the opposite end of the Metal Gear hangar at the bottom of the facility. I'm going to try to locate the rest of the scientists and get them to help me bring the reactor offline._

Mei Ling sighed with relief.

_Jack – thank you. We'll look over things and then update Snake on your situation. He ran into some kind of ninja._

_I know, I saw. Is he all right?_

Mei Ling chuckled, almost darkly.

_Oh, you know Snake. He took care of things in his usual way… but __concentrate__ on the science staff now. Please do your best to bring them back. I think Meryl might be able to extract them, too, if we just start planning it now._

_I copy, _Raiden said. _Look, she's going to give me the location of the reactor core and IT server. Once we find them, be ready to patch the map info over to Snake._

_Roger, Jack. Be careful, _Mei Ling said, and they signed off.

Raiden turned to Sui Lin, who seemed to be looking a little bit better. He held the sword behind his back in the traditional position that ninjas have used for centuries to hide the glint of moonlight from onrushing enemies and paced around the room a bit more, thinking.

"Sui Lin, I need you to tell me where the reactor core is. If we can kill two birds with one stone… I mean… if we can rescue the other science staff and take the reactor offline at once, then our mission will nearly be completed. Snake can take down the IT server – and we'll both destroy the Metal Gear prototype," Raiden said.

"It isn't even operational, so that will be easy," she said. "Here… I think I can upload the map info to your nanomachines from this console."

She sat down at a computer with a floating screen and tapped out a sequence on the keyboard – the Chinese characters appeared on the screen, the dialogue with the computer beeping as Sui Lin quickly input commands.

"There's some kind of GHQ console up at the prison… redirect the info there, if you can. My support team is running the show up there," Raiden said.

At this Sui Lin hesitated.

"I… I won't be able to. The system down here is on a different protocol, which will take too long – and besides, they'll catch on and terminate the link."

"Damn!" Raiden swore, and hung up the HF katana with a sharp clank.

"Here… this is the path to the reactor core, and from there, the Metal Gear prototype hangar and LOX flow hub. And here is the general area surrounding the IT server."

Raiden nodded and got ready to start again, until something occurred to him.

"Hey… what about troops? There have to be some armed security personnel down here besides those robots," he said.

Sui Lin shook her head.

"There are, but they only oversee the security control consoles. Those are located near where Metal Gear is stored… so far down that the CO2 levels become dangerous. It is necessary to keep an oxygen mask on nearly all of the time down there… they'll keep the air bad so that you have difficulty getting to them."

Raiden frowned.

"Not exactly brave, are they?" he said. "That's fine by me. Come on… patch into my nanos and give me the maps. You should be able to interface with me."

Sui Lin made a few more keystrokes, and Raiden saw his map fill with points of reference in English. He smiled, but tried not to make it too wide. Something in him was keeping him guarded around this girl… but he didn't know why he felt that way. It was gnawing at him, something insistent and instinctive, but nothing he could explain.

_Snake is always telling you to follow your gut,_ a part of him said.

_Yeah, but Snake also lied to you on Big Shell several times and is going to kill Sui Lin without batting an eye, _another part said.

"I'm going to call my team," Raiden said to Sui Lin, swatting the conflicting thoughts away from his mind and returning to the cold focus he'd found since Big Shell. "Get ready to move, and move quickly. I don't want to leave you behind."

---

Snake hefted the HF katana in his grasp. He'd never made swords a priority in his CQC training, and he felt a slight pang of resentment being forced to pull one out now. Besides the four-minute memory erasure and knockout Beretta, he had nothing. Even though Otacon and Mei Ling had managed to make it feed the ammo without having to jack the damn action every time, he still didn't expect it would make much difference in a fight against heavily armed security personnel or another of the robot ninjas.

_Okay, hands spaced evenly on the grip, keep it out of the way of your legs while you run, and then it's just like baseball,_ Snake thought to himself as he took a few test swings. He hung it up over his shoulder in the stolen scabbard, and then surveyed his surroundings. The elevator didn't appear to be on its way back, but Snake saw a small service duct that looked like it might lead down – or indeed, anywhere – set in the opposite wall. The Chinese characters said something about "DANGER" and other fairly urgent-sounding words, but he didn't see the characters for "RADIATION" or "BIOHAZARD."

He had been sure to familiarize himself with how those characters looked, and Mei Ling had been happy to teach him.

Snake found the grate stubborn, but a quick pass with the torch found it more yielding, and he was soon crawling through a claustrophobic tunnel with complicated-looking maintenance access panels. It looked like this was where techs went to make sure all the circuits were in order. Snake crawled for what seemed like ten minutes, his breath working heavily.

_Damn it, getting too old to be doing this…,_ Snake thought. _ I'm still winded from that piece of junk…_

Snake stopped for a moment, too exhausted to continue.

_Just rest for a minute, I should be fine… _

_The __cyborg__ ninja reeling back from the first punch, and Snake thought he could see an expression of surprise on the expressionless thing's face._

_"Ah, now we can fight as warriors! Hand to hand! It is the basis of all combat."_

Snake sucked in air so quickly that he heard himself snort. Everything was spinning. The colors weren't right, and the distance to the end of the tunnel stretched away and nearer… away and nearer…

_Frank Jaeger, his dripping stump and exposed face… his body pinned to the ground by Metal Gear Rex and the leering shouts of a face that looked exactly like Snake's. Snake looked into the eyes of his first true mentor. He knew what Frank was supposed to say… but he couldn't hear it, couldn't hear it over the ringing din of something…_

"Emergency. Emergency. High. Levels. Of. Carbon Dioxide. Emergency. Please. Leave. The. Area. High. Levels. Of. Carbon Dioxide…"

_It wasn't Frank after all – he could see that. It was Olga, a ragged bullet-hole in her forehead, her eyes cold and accusing. He'd killed the fathers of so many young women – oftentimes without regret or even later thought. It was what he did – he killed the enemy. But he hadn't killed this girl's father… had not meant to. Yet here she was, accusing him of it again. Liquid roared one final battle-cry as Snake, powerless, watched the giant metal claw come down and crush Olga to a pulp…_

"NO!"

Snake jarred awake, and the voice was his nanosystem reading off data from his Skull Suit.

"Emergency. Oxygen. Levels. Critical."

Snake reached blindly for his oxygen mask, the one he'd taken from the storage room right after he and Raiden had busted into the place. He clicked it on and drank in a deep breath of cool, stale-tasting air. The dizziness and tiredness left him in a single jarring instant. The strength returned to his muscles. A moment of disconcerting nausea washed over him, but he weathered it and welcomed the pounding headache that sprang up into his skull after it passed.

Pain meant alive.

_I almost got done in by oxygen deprivation,_ Snake thought, frowning sourly behind the mask. _They never would've found me, either. Nobody ever would've known._

For some reason, this bothered him more than anything else.

_All right Snake, move…_ he thought, and he stirred his limbs to action again. He only stopped as he heard voices down below. They were speaking in Cantonese, which Snake didn't know. He flipped on his Codec's wave-translator and heard two tinny voices talking over the ones that he heard floating out of the vent in front of him.

"…two of them, we think. One of them destroyed Storm."

Snake found a vent grating and silently crept up to it, peering down at the source of the voices. He saw two totally black troops – their body armor completely dark and marked…

_No… it's almost… moving…_

The armor was only black at first glance. As Snake kept looking at it, the shaping of it started to warp, and he realized that he was looking at some kind of optical illusion created by the armor.

_Chromatic diffusion armor?_Snake wondered. _I think Mei Ling was talking about it once, but it sounded ridiculous… way too costly to produce and heavy as a bastard besides. Did they actually pull it off?_

Snake's eyes strained to make out the details of the troops. He got the impression of heavy anti-ballistic armor, probably Kevlar with ceramic reinforcement. Helmets with built-in respirators – gas and CO2 levels weren't going to deter the enemy, Snake could see. They had Chinese Type 95 rifles – they looked a lot like the FAMAS G2 that Snake had used during Shadow Moses. At least Snake thought that was what they were – they had the same maddening chromatic diffusion finishing that the battle armor did. Beyond that, he could make out grenades at their hips.

"Are they really sure it's Solid Snake?" one of them asked.

"Who else could've taken out all those drones _and_ Storm?" the first said. "Keep on your toes, it wasn't _that_ far from us."

"This is just paranoia," the second one said. "Besides, we're coming up on rotation. Let Yun worry about 'Solid Snake' when he comes on shift."

The troops continued down the hallway. They kept in a very disciplined formation and stance – knees slightly bent, body low and stable against sudden jolts, ready to spring in any direction as a knee-jerk reaction, rifle held not quite up to eye level in order to quickly acquire a target yet keep the field of vision open. Snake realized that this made one of two things true: The soldiers were either incredibly well-trained and on full alert at all times, or they were being constantly monitored by their superiors.

Snake had a feeling it was the latter, and that meant either surveillance cameras stationed all over the place or nanomachine monitoring by a support team not unlike his own. In either case he couldn't risk detection. Which left him with the same question he'd had when he'd started down the tunnel – where to go next?

The guards happened to be patrolling in the same direction Snake was crawling, and he very cautiously made his way after them. Years of crawling through vents had made him adept at being silent about it, but one of the guards still faltered in his patrol and lifted his head as if listening, and Snake came to a total stop, holding his breath.

_He couldn't have heard me!_

The guard turned and looked up at the vent Snake watched him through. Snake was staring at a pair of perfectly round red eyes, and realized he was more than likely being scanned with thermal vision.

_Please tell me the new smart-skin's IR countermeasures work…_ Snake thought.

"What?" the other guard asked.

The guard looked up at the vent and didn't move for a moment, and Snake felt certain he was caught…

The guard reached a hand up to his helmet and struck it a couple of times.

"Stupid thing," he muttered. "My aural enhancement has been inventing ghosts all day. I hate this new equipment."

"Maybe we'll go a whole two months without being issued untested prototypes this time," the other guard said. "That would really be nice."

They moved on, the banter continuing as the soldiers moved down the hallway. Snake held his breath until he hadn't been able to hear them for nearly half a minute, then sighed as quietly as he dared.

_I couldn't even hear myself_, Snake thought. _ These guys have got some impressive tech. Avoiding detection is going to be harder than ever._

Snake hated to stay immobile, but he could see no alternative. Until he had a plan – until he knew precisely how he was going to move, there was no way proceed. The slightest tap of his boot on the ground could raise the entire place up in alarm if his quietest army crawl had nearly excited an alert. If the guards had full-time monitoring – as he had to believe they did if they also had CD finishing on their armor and weapons and aural enhancement _and_ infrared imaging – then taking them down might alert the enemy to his precise position as well.

_Come on, Snake_, he thought to himself. _Come on… for all their fancy gadgets and support, their only real advantage is that they're road blocks no matter what you do to them. So if confronting them or even sneaking past them is out of the question…_

Snake reached to his knockout Beretta and, as quietly as he could, slid out the magazine and took a dart off the top of the clip. The noise of reloading might alert somebody, so he couldn't risk it. He placed the bullet on the ground and retrieved his lighter, then grabbed his knife and cut a small square of his suit's smart-skin off on his forearm. His suit's sensors went crazy for a moment, but he willfully silenced them. He was certain that if Otacon and Mei Ling were monitoring, they would be panicking terribly – that couldn't be helped.

Snake wrapped the back end of the knockout round in the smart-skin so that the propellant was shielded from the lighter, and then he lit the lighter and placed it right behind the wrapped bullet.

_If this works, nobody will ever believe it._

Snake crawled past his impromptu timed explosive as quickly as he could. The smart-skin was extremely fire-retardant, but Snake still only had less than a minute to get distance while still maintaining his silence.

Snake got to a vent and looked down, seeing four guards – the two he'd seen before and the next rotation. As he came to a stop in the vent, one of the guards struck his helmet – Snake cursed himself that he'd made another noise and counted himself lucky that none of the soldiers trusted their equipment.

The knockout round vent off with a loud report, ricocheting crazily. The guards instantly flew toward the source, klaxons and lights going off and drowning out any other noises. Snake heard loud and panicked Chinese, so much that his wave translator couldn't discern its meaning, and then he kicked out the grate and hit the ground, surveying his situation.

Behind him and safely around a corner, the guards investigated the vent. He was in another hexagonal corridor with several offshoots. The symbols above the different junctures weren't any help – but Snake saw that he was still in some kind of maintenance area from all of the exposed piping and boxes that obviously allowed access to electrical conduits. Snake consulted his incomplete map and found himself in a totally blank area.

_Great._

As he came to a door, it started to slide open, and Snake leaped into a niche in the walls and flattened against it, the knife out. Guards rushed past him, whatever aural enhancement they had completely cancelled out by the blaring of the klaxons.

_Just got to get out of this area and reassess the situation… _Snake thought.

His Codec rang and his hand jumped to his ear.

_Snake?__ Snake! _Raiden said.

_Good to hear from you, kid,_ Snake said. _Right now I'm a little tied up, though…_

_Snake, I found a member of the science staff, _Raiden said. _She's given me the positions of the IT server and the reactor core._

_Do you trust the __intel_ Snake asked, peeking the corner and observing an empty room behind the open that the guards had just run out of.

_It checks out with some of our most likely positions, and now we've got a complete map of the facility,_ Raiden said. _I'll transmit to you… I'm showing that you're close to the reactor core now._

_Good, _Snake said. _You take care of the IT server. If you're certain of the intelligence, then terminate the scientist and hurry up._

_You know I won't do that, Snake, _Raiden said. _She's escaping with us._

_Fine,_ Snake said. _We'll see how you feel a little bit later. Once we've taken care of the server and the reactor shutdown, rendezvous at the hangar to ignite the LOX flow. We'll need to figure out some kind of timed explosive if we're going to get back to the elevators in time…_

_There's a back elevator that leads to the surface in Metal Gear's hangar, _Raiden said. _We'll use that to get to the surface._

_What about the other science staff members? _Snake asked.

_I'm going to get to them before you do, _Raiden said. _No matter what you say, I won't kill them, Snake. I'm transmitting the facility layout now._


	4. Chapter 4

Raiden killed the Codec link with Snake and turned back to Sui Lin, putting on what he hoped looked like a reassuring face.

"Snake will take down the IT server – but it's up to you to take me to the reactor," Raiden said. "Then we'll need to destroy the prototype itself and bring down this facility."

"Decommissioning the prototype's weaponry will be easy as long as it isn't operational," Sui Lin said.

Raiden shook his head.

"We're not just decommissioning it, we mean to burn it to the ground," he said.

"But, completely destroying the _Xie Zi_ is impossible!" Sui Lin said before becoming quiet and turning away. It looked to Raiden as if she had said something she shouldn't have.

"Why?" Raiden asked. "Snake and I have destroyed all sorts of Metal Gears. There's always some design flaw, some oversight, something the creators never factored in."

"This one has been designed to resist all forms of conventional weaponry!" Sui Lin finally blurted out when Raiden would not stop staring her down. "It has a special reinforced armor that can't be penetrated by normal weapons."

Raiden belted out a laugh at that.

"Really? So I suppose a HEAT round or a shaped-charge RPG, or a 120mm DU round can't hurt it?" Raiden said. "There isn't a tank yet made that can't be hurt by something."

"Our most talented science staff has dedicated the last ten years to defeating things like the composite-laminate, tungsten boron, and explosive-reactive armor developed by the West," Sui Lin said. "Metal Gear's new armor is constructed of a densely latticed carbonic/metallic alloy."

"Meaning?" Raiden asked.

"It's really, really hard," she said.

"If it isn't active, we can get inside and blow it from the interior," Raiden said. "Now come on, we need to get to the reactor. Where is it from here?"

"Follow me," Sui Lin said, and lead Raiden back out into the hallway.

Raiden noticed that Sui Lin knew how to move without causing too much noise. He followed her lightly, the HF katana active in his grip. They came to the junction and Raiden stepped ahead of her and leaned the corner, scanning the reception area for any threats. Finding it still completely empty, he nodded to her and waved her onward. She rushed for the large desk with the flat-panel screens on it and took a seat, hurriedly typing on the computer.

Raiden stood on alert behind her.

"The reactor is in a high-CO2 area," Sui Lin said as she worked. "The only way we can get there is with some kind of breathing apparatus."

"I've got an oxygen mask," Raiden said. "It's a filtration system – if we take turns taking breaths, we can probably use the one if we hurry… but what about the other scientists?"

"They'll be kept in a pressurized oxygen chamber," Sui Lin said. "There are several chambers, but the computer won't tell me where the scientists are. It's part of the security team's procedure to move us to that area during an enemy attack or natural disaster. We should probably get two masks – we could be separated."

Raiden nodded – it was probably a bad idea to need to share a mask in a firefight.

"I'm trying to get through there," Sui Lin pointed to the hallway with the lasers in it that Raiden had been unable to get past earlier. "There's a storage room for guards who need to patrol this area during a breakdown in the automated defenses… there!"

Raiden felt the buzzing from the lasers abate and knew them to be deactivated.

"We'll take that hallway," said Sui Lin, indicating the one behind the desk, "after we've stocked up. That will take us to a conveyor car that leads to the deep central core area."

"Let's go," Raiden said, taking the lead as they headed down the left hallway.

The single door at the end of the hallway had a coded lock on it with a number pad. Sui Lin punched in the number and the door slid open to reveal a soldier's playground of personal weapons and equipment. Raiden wasted no time – the room had P90s with magazines, chaff grenades, timed charges, and SIG P228 pistols, and in a matter of a minute Raiden had a sidearm, a sub-machinegun, four chaff grenades, and a satchel loaded with timed explosives that he handed to Sui Lin, who held it at arm's length and stood stock still as Raiden finished loading up.

Sui Lin located an oxygen mask for herself after some searching, and then gingerly offered Raiden the satchel back. Raiden smiled and shook his head.

"That's up to you. I'm going to be wading into the action – you need to keep those safe until we blow the LOX. There's no guarantee Snake can find anything else between now and then."

Sui Lin nodded weakly.

"O-okay," she said.

Raiden put his finger to right behind his ear and consulted the Soliton map again.

"Looks like that hallway behind the desk leads to a large freight elevator, surrounded on all sides by hallways that lead over to more labs," he said. "We'll have to take it down, right?"

Sui Lin nodded.

"Is there another access point if the elevator won't respond?" he asked.

"Yes, there's a maintenance stairway that leads the entire way down. It's about a hundred meters down to get to the reactor general area. There shouldn't be security."

"Then let's go."

---

Snake looked around the room he'd leaped into. The place was still on high alert – the footsteps of guards beat across the floors outside. It wouldn't be long before they determined that Snake had to be in this room. It had consoles, wall-panel screens, and a large locker in one corner. In desperation, Snake opened up the locker and found it filled to the brim with weapons.

_Well,_he thought, _guess I've got guns now, whether I can use them or not._

He laid hands on a QBZ-95 assault rifle – the one that looked like a knockoff of the FAMAS – and five or six of the 30-round magazines, loading one immediately, then scouring the locker for any handguns. His eye fell on a Glock 17. He frowned and grabbed it.

_This is the best they could do?_ Snake thought, taking a healthy allotment of ammunition for it and loading it. Snake had always thought the handgun had been made with a simpler design precisely to patronize law enforcement agents. The good news was that both weapons had the CD finishing, so if he recovered them and took them back to base, he might be able to have Otacon and Mei Ling reverse-engineer them and make up some more for him another time.

That started to seem less important to him as he heard the approaching footfalls of guards.

_Come on, Snake, hide!_ his eyes darted around the small room.

They fell on the locker again, but this time to the space between the locker and the wall. The locker was free-standing, and Snake had just enough room...

The door slid open automatically at the nano-cast signal of the guards. Snake heard the footsteps of three of them. His wave translator was still turned on. The klaxons blared from the hallway. Snake heard one of the guards move into the room, heard the shifting of equipment on his body as he searched every blind spot.

"Clear!" came the voice through Snake's translator.

The klaxons died down and a voice came over the intercom.

"All personnel, revert to orange level security protocol. Possible sabotage in Sector 17F South. Fire teams five through eleven, report to security station 6."

Snake held his breath, too afraid even to exhale slightly. "Possible sabotage" could also mean "false alarm," but he'd already relied on the incompetence of his enemies too much. He couldn't hope that they just thought the explosion a regular mishap.

"I've got this room," said the guard who had cleared it to the two others. "Get back on standard patrol. I'll man the monitoring station."

The other two guards gave him affirmatives and then Snake heard the wonderful sound of the door sliding shut. A breathless moment later, Snake heard the unmistakable sound of the helmet coming off the soldier's head, followed by an exhausted sigh as he slumped down into the chair in front of the security console.

_Now._

Snake slid out from behind the locker and pulled his knockout Beretta. The soldier was facing the screen, turned away from Snake, staring tiredly at the monitor, not even hearing Snake until the moment when he thumbed the hammer and leveled it at the back of the troop's head.

"Freeze," Snake's voice was cold, quiet, and final. He'd practiced just enough Mandarin under Mei Ling's instruction to issue the few orders he needed in the field.

The troop went rigid, and Snake could see he was in a moment of total indecision. Try to turn, and take down this man? Or comply, and risk getting killed anyway?

"Do as I say, and you won't be hurt," Snake said in his halting Mandarin. "This isn't worth never seeing your family again."

"What about yours?" the guard asked him without turning around. Even through the translator, Snake had to commend the guy on how calm he sounded. "Did you say goodbye to your own family before you came here to die in this coffin?"

"I have no family," Snake said. It was another phrase he'd learned well. "Call off the alert and deactivate security in this area. Tell them it was a malfunction and that there is no intruder."

The guard stayed perfectly still. Snake saw the shadow of a movement and grabbed the troop by his black hair, yanking hard.

"Now."

The troop said something foul and then did as he was told. He pressed a button and then spoke in what Snake again found to be a remarkably collected voice.

"Personnel, be advised that disturbance was a malfunction. No intruders located in 17F South. Fire teams return to staging areas. All personnel, return to your positions and downgrade to green level security protocol. That is all."

He then struck a few keys on the floating holographic keyboard, and the screens all went dark.

"There you are, American," the troop said, spinning around in the chair to look Snake in the face, only to be shot with the tranquilizer dart in the neck vein, rendering him insensate in an instant.

_The memory erasure will be pushing it on this one,_ Snake thought._I've got to hope it's four minutes like Otacon claims._ Snake removed the dart from the man's neck with a quick action and tossed it behind the locker where it would likely never be found. He then searched out the power cord to the computer and used the torch to sear it away from the wall.

"You're going to get me out of here, my friend," Snake addressed the downed soldier, and hoped that the armor the man wore would fit him.

---

_How in the hell does anybody operate with all this crap floating around their eyes?_ Snake wondered as he activated the soldier's internal helmet HUD. A full Soliton radar sat in one corner, totally independent from his nanomachines, augmented with little status bars next to each soldier, except for a couple. It appeared that some suits were malfunctioning and blacking out – Snake thought that maybe the other soldiers took the blackout of the soldier he'd taken down as a routine failure. His own suit was telling him his nano-cast wasn't working – it obviously interpreted the incompatible signal from his nanomachines as silence.

_Until they get this stuff to work like it's supposed to, I'll stick to my way of doing things_, Snake thought, shaking his head as he exited the security monitoring room, leaving the slumbering body of the guard behind him. It had been tough shoving him into the locker, and Snake again had to hope that he didn't start snoring and that the troops wouldn't notice the guns shoved behind the lockers to make room for the downed man – moreover, he needed to hope that they didn't find out about him until he had at least cleared the current security zone.

He'd thought about discarding the HF katana, but decided it might come in handy, stowing it in the huge equipment pack that the soldier's uniform came equipped with. Inside, the soldier had a large battery pack to run most of the junk in the suit and lots of other equipment that Snake failed to see the need for, considering they were so close to support. The sword fit awkwardly at an angle into the bag, the hilt protruding slightly, but with the CD finishing on the equipment and the fact it was so dark in the area and that the troops were relying largely on IR imaging to see everything, it hardly mattered. Snake reflected soberly on how reliant these fools had become on spotty technology.

_This entire area is prepared for disaster on a grand scale,_ Snake thought. _Taking out supply dumps probably isn't going to affect the performance of troops overly much. Probably shouldn't risk it if I find one._

He closed his eyes to ignore the helmet HUD and consulted his own Soliton radar – finding that the IT server was a fair trek through what was labeled a "Habitation Wing." Snake sighed – he wasn't always the best at fitting in with disguises, and who knew what sort of protocol he'd need to fake his way through just to get to the other end. He adopted the stance of one of the guards and moved down the hallway toward the exit to the habitation wing, his QBZ-95 at the ready.

He passed close to another oncoming guard, who gave him a nod that, for his part, he returned with genuine courtesy. He got to the door, a pressure-sealed affair that once again responded to nano-cast. To his surprise, his suit's HUD beeped and the door's light blatted in the affirmative, the little light on the reader turning green and the door sliding open. It took Snake a second to realize that his suit had taken the trouble of casting an open signal for him in the absence of his own nanos. He shook the hesitation out of himself, got back into character, and walked into the next hallway.

The entire tone of the scene changed. The lighting inside this area was bright, all new soft fluorescents. The tile was a bright red, the hallway wide and accommodating of large amounts of foot traffic, doors on either side lining the hallway and junctures branching off in all directions. The place had a high ceiling that disappeared into a strange, sky-like lurking darkness, metal stairs coiling up to second and third tiers.

Snake looked over to his left and saw, of all damn things, a storefront with café-style tables and chairs and a glass façade. A group of young Chinese women who reminded Snake unnervingly of Mei Ling sat chatting animatedly over cups of green tea and porcelain plates of different types of dim sum with lacquered chopsticks. They noticed Snake looking at them from behind his concealing helmet and they all giggled demurely. Snake realized how inconspicuous he was being and moved on as they chirped so quickly and quietly to each other that his wave translator seized and he grew so irritated with it that he turned it off until he got out of earshot.

There were stores, restaurants, and the other trappings of home. Above, Snake could see that there were apartments, based on the style of the doors and the way people entered and exited them with such a lack of concern. There were hundreds of people milling about – construction workers, technicians, groups of soldiers running around in training fatigues, people with MP3-players plugged into their ears as they held bags of groceries.

_This just got complicated,_ Snake thought. _I'm going to need to sound some kind of alert to get these people out of here. They probably aren't science personnel – they can escape without compromising the destruction of the Metal Gear program. It probably isn't safe to contact Raiden in this area… but he has to know._

Snake consulted his map again, and found that he needed to board a large cargo elevator that would take him down to the floor with the IT servers. He moved through the area, very conscious of how out-of-place he looked until he saw two other soldiers on patrol, talking with civies and generally laughing and cutting up. Snake sneaked by them, not bothering to worry if it made him seem antisocial.

He rounded a corner and found himself at the end of the fun district. Two soldiers stood a grim guard over the elevator. The elevator itself was an open platform that lead down a diagonal tube, far down into nowhere. The floor of the habitation wing just ended and the blackness stretched out as if it had form – Snake couldn't see to the other side of the rift and wondered just how far away the nearest wall or bedrock was. At this point, he had no gauge of how deep underground he was.

Snake's mind raced as he approached the guards. Even though he had some command of Mandarin, he couldn't put on a convincing accent, and that would give him away. The two soldiers had not paid him any attention yet, talking as they were to one another. Snake stepped into a small alcove where he wouldn't be seen and thought about his options.

_I need to get these people to evacuate, and I also need to get rid of these guards, _he thought. _No reason why I can't try to scare up some kind of solution for both. If there was some way I could call an alert without calling attention to myself at the same time…_

Snake wondered if he could just shout "Alert!" over the suit's internal radio once and see if that was enough. He tried to practice saying the word as convincingly as he could, muttering to himself.

Suddenly, the HUD in his helmet popped up a large, red, urgent-looking query as the word escaped his lips. Snake realized, with amazement, that the helmet was asking him if he was serious about there being an alert and where it was located.

_That's funny… _Snake thought, _Alerts haven't been so instantaneous and all-reaching since those Genomes at Shadow Moses._

Snake used the movement of his eyes to focus a little red dot right in the center of the habitation wing, and then blinked to confirm. The split-second he did, klaxons went off and the two guards rushed past Snake's alcove. Snake heard the amusing sound of every citizen behind him shouting in confusion and consternation, more guards streaming from the other entrances. Snake walked calmly over to the freight elevator and pressed the button for the floor he wanted.

The elevator sank as chaos unfolded above and Snake allowed himself a moment without the helmet on.

"Have fun, fellas," Snake said as the previous floor disappeared from view.


	5. Chapter 5

The door slid open and Raiden moved forward, the HF katana hung up on his back and the P90 held at the ready. Sui Lin crept along at the read, peeking out from behind him fearfully. The hallway ahead had no patrols, and Raiden felt fairly certain there weren't any cameras. The hallway lead straight to a freight elevator that was an open, flat platform with raising gates. Raiden took a few tentative steps, waited, then decided the area was clear and waved Sui Lin to follow him onto the elevator.

She hit the button as she got onto the platform and the gates slid into place and locked. Raiden prepared for the sinking feeling of the elevator's descent, but instead was greeted by an angry blat and some negative-sounding female Chinese voice berating him over something.

"Not that easy, huh?" Raiden asked, cracking a smile for Sui Lin's benefit.

"It's all right," she said. "The maintenance stairway is right there," she said, pointing to a narrow railed stairway extending from the edge of the elevator and descending into the lower dark of the elevator shaft.

Raiden sighed.

"I guess Snake wouldn't complain about having to hump it for a bit. Let's try to hurry."

The stairs zigzagged downward, and Raiden and Sui Lin got used to the back and forth and back and forth travel, their footfalls clanking and the stairs creaking and swaying with their weight. Raiden thought that the whole setup seemed about fifty pounds shy of collapsing.

_Chinese ingenuity_, he thought, but didn't dare to say.

"We're nearly there!" Sui Lin said. "That doorway there, ten more meters down, should lead to the reactor core level."

"No sign of any patrols, either," Raiden said. "I guess we've been pretty fortu…"

Raiden's innate sense of danger kicked in and he ducked as an HF blade slashed the air his torso had just occupied. A hair-line rip opened up on the front of Sui Lin's lab coat and she shrieked and fell into a sitting position. Raiden heard the sound of somebody leaping over them, and then they both felt the vibration of a heavy person landing behind Sui Lin.

"Stealth camo! Run to the lab… go, GO!" Raiden shouted, grabbing Sui Lin and shoving him past him on the narrow stairs, opening fire with the P90 in the general direction of the stairs behind and above him.

The blurred, translucent form at the head of the stairs deflected the bullets, sparks and hot metal spraying down on Raiden like glowing rainfall. Raiden exhausted the clip and dropped the P90.

"Bullshit!" he snarled, his katana ringing as he drew it, the worthless P90 clattering down the steps behind him.

Raiden had the vague impression that a blow was about to come down on his head, and he raised the HF katana in a high block, his knees and elbows straining against the impossible force of the strike as he guarded against it. Raiden heard the door below them slide open and Sui Lin get inside before it shut behind her.

_Good_, he thought in the desperation of the fight, _she's okay._

The next strike came from the left, aimed at his exposed under-arm, and he brought the blade vertical to his left, shunting it aside and then kicking out. His shin clanged against something metallic and unyielding and he shouted in pain.

"ARGH! Show yourself!" Raiden shouted, lashing out with the point of his blade, shoving it forward with the full force of both arms and leaning into the strike.

For his hotheadedness, he received a strike with the flat of the blade, falling to the stairs and striking his chin on the cold edge of one of the steps and biting his lip. He spat a wad of blood out of his mouth and guarded as another strike aimed at the crown of his head slammed sparks off his raised blade.

Raiden took his right hand off the hilt and drew the SIG, opening fire wildly at hulking menace standing over him. The bullets struck the assailant and caused him, her, or it to stumble back a single step. The blurriness in front of Raiden's eyes flickered and resolved itself into a form Raiden was more than familiar with.

"This is China," Raiden said. "Aren't ninjas _Japanese?_"

The ninja inclined its head for a moment as if unsure how to respond to that, then stabbed downward toward Raiden's crotch. Raiden rolled back in time to save himself, then arched his back with enough force to propel himself back onto his feet and waved his sword in a wild horizontal slice that caught the robot ninja across its right bicep. More of that weird mechanical blood stuff burst from the wound, but rather than slowing the thing down, it pressed the attack again without skipping a beat.

Raiden found himself warding off innumerable blows as he gave ground, stumbling back up the stairs. He got in another shot with the SIG that panged across the thing's faceplate, cracking it – then the ninja slashed the gun in half and Raiden dropped it, putting both hands back on the sword and stabbing forward, wounding the ninja in its left shoulder.

The ninja grabbed the blade with its free hand and with unbelievable strength forced it back. Raiden snarled and swore as he tried to drive it deeper, aware as he did so that the thing was toying with him, using only one hand to remove the sword even as Raiden strained with every fiber of his strength – the ninja not even bothering to attack him with its own sword.

_I'm alive because most of Big Boss's troops were stupid hotheads,_ Snake had said to him once, not long after Raiden had sought out Philanthropy. _I'm alive and they're dead because Miller, Jaeger, and Campbell taught me to fight with my head instead of all the guns I learned how to fire in Kuwait._

Raiden suddenly remembered that there was more to the HF katana than just a cutting edge.

He flicked on the electrical stun current and dialed it up to full. The ninja shuddered, some high-pitched shrieking emitting from its internal workings. Raiden felt its grip loosen on his own blade. Suddenly the ninja started striking its own sword out, lashing at Raiden in blind cuts that he dodged, keeping the electrified blade shoved into his enemy.

"DIE!" Raiden shouted, sliding the blade in farther as the ninja dropped its own sword. The crack in the faceplate grew, pieces falling off and revealing the odd circuitry beneath.

The shriek rose to an unbearable pitch, and then the ninja thrust its free hand out, a lightning bolt blowing apart the section of stairs above them, fiery metal debris raining down. A chunk struck Raiden across the cheek and sent him reeling, the HF katana flying from his grip and spiraling into the inky darkness below.

_Great, _Raiden thought as he picked himself up. _Bare hands now_.

The ninja punched Raiden in the gut and he doubled over, then took a knee to the face. The world swam as Raiden picked himself up, instinctively blocking as another kick aimed at his face cracked against his forearms and shot pain through this arms.

_I'm not some legendary superhero,_ Snake had said, lighting up a cigarette. _It's rarely as simple as a knockdown fight… at least it usually isn't one when it matters. Sometimes honor is what you make of it. I've used every filthy trick in the book, and a few that haven't ever been written down… and it's why I'm still here to pass on what I know to the next generation._

Raiden reached to his belt and grabbed one of the grenades, pulling the pin and hurling it directly at the ninja. The ninja's fist closed over the grenade, cradling it, totally unafraid.

One second.

The ninja tossed the grenade up and caught it, advancing a couple of steps as Raiden retreated.

Two seconds.

A shiver of lighting danced along the ninja's free arm, and as it waved its hand over the rail, fingers of crackling light tickled across the metal surface. Raiden held his ground.

Three seconds.

Raiden smiled.

"It's three klicks to the bottom of this shaft, asshole, and I bet you haven't got a parachute."

The ninja looked at the grenade in its hand and realized it was a chaff grenade.

The grenade blew and the ninja roared in indignation, all of its actuators seizing up as the metal shower scrambled its sensors and kept it from making any informed decisions on where and how to move. Raiden allowed himself a single moment to pity a creature incapable of operating without such precise instructions, and then wound up his muscles and put every ounce of his strength behind the most ruthless roundhouse kick he'd ever delivered in his life.

The kick slammed into the ninja's side and sent it into and then through the railing, snapping the flimsy metal apart. The ninja sailed into the great beyond and plummeted into the black, a disembodied shrieking echoing after it. Raiden sank to the stairs and cradled his right shin in his arms, rubbing it up and down.

"I hate ninjas," he muttered.


End file.
